Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday October 03, 2012 @03:57PM
from the waiting-on-google-smell-o-vision dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Google seems determined to press forward with Google Glass technology, filing a patent for a Google Glass wristwatch. As pointed out by CNET, the timepiece includes a camera and a touch screen that, once flipped up, acts as a secondary display. In the patent, Google refers to the device as a 'smart-watch. Whether or not a Google Glass wristwatch ever appears on the marketplace — just because a tech titan patents a particular invention doesn't mean it's bound for store shelves anytime soon — the appearance of augmented-reality accessories brings up a handful of interesting issues for everyone from app developers to those tasked with handling massive amounts of corporate data.For app developers, augmented-reality devices raise the prospect of broader ecosystems and spiraling complexity. It's one thing to build an app for smartphones and tablets — but what if that app also needs to handle streams of data ported from a pair of tricked-out sunglasses or a wristwatch, or send information in a concise and timely way to a tiny screen an inch in front of someone's left eye?"

It's one thing to build an app for smartphones and tablets — but what if that app also needs to handle streams of data ported from a pair of tricked-out sunglasses or a wristwatch, or send information in a concise and timely way to a tiny screen an inch in front of someone's left eye?"

How is this "spiraling complexity" in any way? There are standards. There are APIs. If they don't exist today, they will, necessitated for such issues.

It's one thing to build an app for smartphones and tablets — but what if that app also needs to handle streams of data ported from a pair of tricked-out sunglasses or a wristwatch, or send information in a concise and timely way to a tiny screen an inch in front of someone's left eye?"

How is this "spiraling complexity" in any way? There are standards. There are APIs. If they don't exist today, they will, necessitated for such issues.

In other words, Zynga, the authors of "Angry birds" and the like are the only ones that are fucked. A decent software engineer will certainly survive this complexity.

You're crazy. It's 2012. Everyone knows now that the best way to deal with lots of data is to encode it all into XM, then hack together some XSLT, and then pepper the output with JQuery. This way you get an inefficient data storage system, terrible performance, unwieldy code, and a rounded button with a gradient background. The gradient works in FF 17+, IE 9/10, IE 8 with an added hack, Safari maybe (we didn't actually test), and usually Chrome (it breaks every few releases and fixes itself in the following one).

But the truth is that HTML/CSS is an extremely robust standard, one that works rather well in numerous environments for me TODAY such as my Linux Laptop, my Windows Laptop, my phone, and my tablet, and across multiple products. (Firefox, Chrome, IE, Android browser)

No standard is perfect. But teasing this standard is just silly - it's wildly successful!

Is all of the coding community really dreading the awesome complexity that seems to be our technological future? It is something they should be welcoming with open arms. I for one want to be one to push the boundaries and do something no one has done before, but apparently whoever wrote this would rather forget about the future, and huddle in their cubicle writing terminal programs for their 486.

See how TFA is a Slashdot BI story? The people having the headaches aren't the coders, but the IT people who support the cloud servers that support their products. The cure, presumably, is buying more business solutions. This is a "people are gonna buy stuff!" market-manipulating fluff piece, which is why it makes no sense to us as engineers. It boils down to "we're dumb enough to think the idea of a lot of people streaming video simultaneously is a non-trivial problem for existing infrastructure, and we wa

what if that app also needs to handle streams of data ported from a pair of tricked-out sunglasses or a wristwatch, or send information in a concise and timely way to a tiny screen an inch in front of someone's left eye

So what if it does? Dealing with different form factors is not exactly new when it comes to developing for most mobile platforms. And an input stream is an input stream - the only thing that matters is the kind of data in the stream. A camera is a camera, no matter where it's mounted - and presumably application developers are smart enough to use stream metadata to determine the input source in cases where it should affect UX.

It's one thing to build an app for smartphones and tablets â" but what if that app also needs to handle streams of data ported from a pair of tricked-out sunglasses or a wristwatch, or send information in a concise and timely way to a tiny screen an inch in front of someone's left eye?

Handling streams of data from glasses or a watch is no different than handling any other stream of data. So that problems mostly solved.

Sending data in a concise and timely way doesn't really depend on the size or location of the screen (unless its someplace that is hard to communicate with, e.g., deep underwater [making most broadcast mechanism troublesome] in a place where it is inconvenient to run a cable.)

UI, on the other hand, is going to need to be dealt with, and, yeah, there's going to be some interesting challenges in UI design for apps that interact through devices like Google Glass (either the glasses or the proposed watch.) But its not like either of these will become ubiquitous overnight. There'll be plenty of time to work on the UI issues and develop reasonable early UI paradigms when the devices are in very limited distribution, and then UIs will evolve with more experience just like they have with every other kind of device.

Do not use one of these things while driving please. It's a little know issue of "looking but not seeing". That is to say, you may be aware of the red light in front of you, but your attention is not focused on comprehending its meaning. Big problem!

It's not that there's "too much data," or "too many differing sources/devices," it's that there's too many goddamn proprietary standards that make universal cross-compatibility impossible. Hell, if we were to collectively ditch all proprietary formats in favor of universally accepted standards, this would be a non-issue and we could, as a species, stop wasting so much of our precious time waxing philosophic about the perils of cross-device compatibility, and just get shit done.

The stagnation of progress in the name of profits pisses me off to no end, can you tell? I want my fucking Omni-Tool!

Glass, search emails keyword spaghetti recipe. Open email to Tim. Open video attachment. Transcribe to spaghetti.txt. New email to hawguy, Hey hawguy, here is that transcript you asked for. I hope you like it as much as Tim did, yummy! Glass, end email. Insert spaghetti.txt. Send email.

The summary is silly, the real story here is the wristwatch. From glancing through the article and the patent it looks like Google Glass, but on a transparent LCD screen that you look through instead of VRD. That could be cool for people who feel uncomfortable with a laser projecting an image onto their retina. (Not me though, I'm hoping to replace my tv with netflix streamed to a VRD asap)

It's not in the patent or article, but one use I see for a wearable watch is to serve as the trackpad for the AR glasses, or in other words, a wearable wireless computer "mouse". If I understand the GooGlass design correctly, navigation is either via voice or by fiddling some controls place behind the left or right ear piece of the glasses. A wristwatch should provide more finger surface besides being a gadget in its own right. Control GooGlass via the wristwatch should be technically more feasible than a

I'd still like a set of skydiving goggles that put accurate altitude and heading in front of my eyes. I doubt it'd cost much more than another digital altimeter to use as an audible warning. There are some ski goggles with something similar, but the max altitude is too low and they look pretty bulky for skydiving. I'm also not sure the altitude in them updates frequently enough to be useful on a skydive.